Slaveholders were, even in the best of times, a worried group of people. Although they professed to care paternally for their slaves and sometimes even believed their slaves loved them, occasionally their behavior betrayed a deep underlying fear. On February 26, 1861, an article appeared in the Richmond Enquirer demonstrating just how on edge were Virginia’s slaveholders. Evidently upset that Virginia’s secession convention was shying away from separation, some planters were contemplating an exodus from the state.

This trepidation of Virginia’s slaveholders, as the secession winter drew to a close, presaged planters in many places in the South, who would “refugee” their slaves to places, particularly Texas, as far as way as they could get them from Union forces. But it is particularly interesting seeing the fear underlying refugee activities being exhibited so early. Clearly, many Virginia slaveholders saw Abraham Lincoln, whose inauguration as President was now only days away on February 26, as a clear and present danger to slavery and if their state wouldn’t secede were prepared take their slaves to areas where they felt safer, presumably the Lower South states that had already seceded. It was the only way to calm their fears of emancipation and their slaves.

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com